The customer service process or customer service supply chain is critical to organisations, sadly many organisations pay this “lip service”. An ongoing experience with BT retail demonstrates how dysfunctional this can become. I rarely shame companies but in my frustration it seems appropriate. Research by Karl Albrecht & Ron Zemke shows that truly Customer Centric organisations exhibit the following characteristics. 1.They have a strong vision – a strategy for service that is clearly developed and clearly communicated 2.They “talk” service routinely 3.They have customer-friendly service systems 4.They balance, high-tech with high-touch, that is, they temper their systems and methods with the personal factor 5.They recruit, hire, train, and promote for service 6.They market service to their customers 7.They market service internally, that is, to their employees 8.They measure service and make the results available I often work with companies and get them to rate themselves out of 10 on the above dimensions. How would BT Retail rate themselves? But more importantly how would customers rate BT? Interestingly for the past few weeks as a customer I have been trying to get a telephone line, calls and broadband package installed for my daughter. It would seem however that the silo approach to customer service and not recognising customer service is a critical cross functional and cross organisation supply chain has resulted in the most frustrating and worst experience I have had in over 20 years. I have been lied to on multiple occasions and it seems the system is set up to ensure issues cannot be escalated so powerless customer support individuals can do nothing. Before explaining the case in detail let me summarise the key issues to date. (I will continue to update this as things develop so do come back). Over 7.5 hours on telephone and still no resolution. (Will I be compensated for this time?) 1 days holiday taken for wasted engineer visits and we are expected to take more time out for this. Paid over £150 for line rental and direct debits are being taken despite no service! Multiple promises none fulfilled. Texts stating will be called back, no call backs received. 0800 number provided but if you no phone this costs you on a mobile! Out of 7 promised call backs only one received. In my household a promise made and not kept is a lie.First installation date promise 16th December and still nothing..... I do hope senior management from BT Retail may take note and review their customer care procedures. I will continue to update this blog to further document any further bad and good practice. But enjoy the timeline below (Read More) and ask what would your business do differently?